by Omar Tyree
“What’s wrong with Philly? They have the neo-soul movement popping right now. The new Sixers . . .”
I cut her off and said, “But you’re not there because you realized that you had to make things happen elsewhere. Sometimes it’s just better to leave home.”
I had Tracy stumped for a second.
She finally said, “We’ll see.” She wasn’t going to make it easy for me.
* * *
By the time August rolled around, I was on solo missions of my own, finding my way around L.A., and Tracy was nearly done filming her second movie. Her next project was already lined up, writing For the Love of Money, the sequel to Flyy Girl.
She began to talk about the process of interviews with author Omar Tyree, who was supposed to fly out to L.A. to ask her a thousand questions about the next phase of her life. After Tracy’s adolescence and teen years had been published to huge success, she and Omar planned to team up for more of the same.
I still had not been able to rectify the situation at home with my mother, so it looked more and more like I would either be staying out in L.A. with Tracy, or returning to Philly to stay with my aunt Pattie.
So, for the rest of my days in L.A., I worked hard on being the best personal assistant to Tracy that I could be. I took mental notes on what she liked and didn’t like, where and what she liked to eat, who she wanted to talk to and who not. I cleaned and organized the house. I collected her news and magazine articles and filed them alphabetically in folders. I met her business associates, publicist, hairdressers—you name it. And I listened to and tried to understand her every complaint and suggestion. I basically forced myself to map out my cousin’s entire psychological profile, all so she would allow me to stay with her for as long as I wanted. I had to allow her a chance to see that I would be more of an asset to her than a hindrance.
In the meantime, Jason had worn out his welcome with more than a few California girls, who began to realize that his slash-and-burn attitude was counterproductive to a meaningful relationship with them. The reality was that if he was so set on only a temporary stay in L.A., then what was the point of getting too close to him? And once they began to figure him out, Jason felt less opportunistic about his chances.
“Aw, man, I’m about to get up out of here,” he complained. “Y’all jinxed me. Ever since that day we had that argument, these girls’ve been acting funny on me.”
I smiled and said, “You had it coming. You were just a little too cocky.”
He said, “Aw’ight, well, you’re about to get your wish then. I’m about to start getting ready for school now. But what about you? You gon’ go to school out here?” he asked me.
I said, “I want to.”
Jason nodded. “Good luck then.”
It was the only time he said anything of encouragement to anyone outside of himself since he had been out there in L.A. Too bad it was only because he was leaving. But I’d take it however I could get it.
“Thanks,” I told him.
* * *
As soon as Jason took that plane ride back home to Philly and left me all alone with Tracy in L.A., I became more nervous about what her verdict would be with me.
I attended a wrap party with her for Road Kill in Santa Monica with the intention of being as perfect as I could. Most of her new Hollywood friends were there, and I wanted to make a great impression.
“So you’re the infamous Vanessa Tracy Smith?” her lawyer friend Yolanda Felix asked me with a glass of wine in her hand. I had heard about her, but I had not met her until then. From what I had heard about her, Yolanda Felix was a hell of a character. She had the golden-brown, Hollywood skin, the long dark hair, the fancy clothes, the slim physique, the expensive jewelry, and the twinkle of a high-class and viperous woman. I figured I needed to be as forward with her as I could to keep her from intimidating me. She was definitely the intimidating type.
I said, “And you’re the infamous Yolanda Felix?” just to throw her comment about me back in her face.
There was no mistaking who she was. Some people will always stand out in a crowd. I knew that from high school, and Hollywood was only the tenth degree of the same process.
“So what did you hear about me?” Yolanda asked me.
I kept my guard up with her. I had too much to lose if I didn’t. She was the kind of in-your-face sister who would figure you were weak if you let your guard down with her.
I asked her, “What did you hear about me?”
She smiled. She said, “You’re Tracy’s cousin all right. So how long will it take before you’re in movies?”
Her question threw me for a loop. I wasn’t thinking about movies for myself. I just wanted to be behind the scenes.
I said, “I think you’re more of the movie type than I am.”
“Not from what I’ve heard,” she insisted.
I became nervous for a minute. I started to wonder what she had heard. She was breaking me down.
I said, “You must have heard the wrong things then,” and lost my eye contact with her.
“Are you sure?” Yolanda pressed me.
I was wondering if Tracy had told her about my scuffle with my mother. I doubted it, but I wasn’t certain. That’s what pressure makes you do. Yolanda was running me through a test to see how much guts I had.
“Hey guys, what are you two talking about?” Susan Raskin popped up to rescue me. I took a breath and relaxed.
I answered, “Movies,” and caught Tracy’s nod to me from across the room. There were too many people smothering my cousin as the star of the movie for her to just break away, so she sent her agent Susan over to me just in time.
Yolanda asked her, “What do you think about her chances?” referring to me in starring movie roles.
Susan took a good look at me in my lime green satin dress and said, “As long as she prepares herself accordingly, Vanessa has the chops to do whatever she wants to.”
It was a good answer. Susan was helping to encourage me while keeping me on my p’s and q’s about proper preparation. It was one thing to lift a person up, it was something else to tell them the truth while you’re at it.
I was learning what to expect rather quickly there. The wrap party was like a Hollywood crash course. A couple of older guys even tried to come on to me, rich white men.
“So, ah, I hear you’re the star’s cousin out of Philly.”
“Yeah,” I answered a blond-haired white man with poise. He looked around forty, but he was probably older than that. I was aware that people in Hollywood spent millions of dollars to maintain their youth.
He slipped out a business card without telling me his name and tried to slide it inside my small purse.
“If you need anything you just let me know, okay?”
I moved my purse away from his reach and told him, “I can’t take that. I’m underage.”
I was embarrassed again, and wondering who was watching us. It was simply too many people in the room to think that no one would see it. I’m sure he knew it as well.
So he performed a quick trick with his hand and hid the card inside of his palm.
In passing, he told me, “There’s no such thing as underage in Hollywood, my dear.”
That was it. Mr. Man moved on to the next conversation.
I was tempted to fade into the corners of the room and keep out of sight at that point. But a lime green, satin dress made that hard to do.
“How are you? I love this color,” an older white woman said, while rubbing my dress material in her fingers. She didn’t even ask if she could touch it first.
I looked into her aged face and said “Thank you.” I don’t know how old the woman was, but she had so many lines in her face that I realized instantly why so many older white men chased after girls who could pass for their daughters.
I must admit, I was ready to leave that place early. It wasn’t my kind of party. They had no hip-hop or R&B music, few people my age, and few people of color.
; “Are you having fun yet?” Tracy’s friend Kendra asked me. She was being sarcastic. I’m quite sure she could read the look of bewilderment on my face. I had no idea what I was getting into out in Hollywood.
I took a deep breath and responded, “This is really different.”
“Tell me about it,” Kendra said. She blended in a lot better with the crowd in her black business suit. But she was one of the brownest faces in the room.
She said, “By the fourth party, you’ll get good and used to it. But that still doesn’t mean you have to like it. I only come to these things because Tracy asks me to, to keep her grounded in reality. So when she sees me, she relaxes. We have a little system going.”
I told her, “I see. Are there any black parties out in Hollywood?” I asked.
I was just curious to know where the black stars did their thing.
Kendra said, “Oh, there’s definitely black parties. We just don’t have as many because we don’t wrap as many movies as they do. You know what I mean?”
I nodded to her. Hollywood was white America’s biggest invention, and I would not soon forget that.
By the end of the wrap party I was worn out, and it was only eleven o’clock. However, spending a few hours with those people was quite enough.
I leaned back into the black leather seats of our stretch limo, alone with my cousin, and Tracy went right at me.
“You see how this game works?” she asked me.
Did I ever. I just nodded to her. One Hollywood party like that was all it took.
“And you think you can handle this on a regular basis?”
I wasn’t so sure anymore, but I was still willing to try.
“I mean, won’t it be different at a black party?” I asked her. I had never been surrounded by that many white people before. Or at least not in an intimate setting.
Tracy answered, “A little bit. But at the white parties, at least you stand out. I’ve been to black parties where everybody’s waiting for Denzel Washington to show up. And he won’t show until the party’s nearly over. So what fun is that?”
“What about the younger stars?” I asked her.
“What younger stars? The television people? Nobody gets excited over them,” she told me. “They’re all trying to get into movies.”
I was confused a minute. Was my cousin telling me that we really didn’t have any stars in black Hollywood? Because I would have been excited to meet a few.
She read my confusion and said, “Understand this, Vanessa, if you understand nothing else about fame and stardom. There are really only two levels in this game: stars who are in projects, and actors and actresses who are trying to get into projects. And you’re only a star when you’re attached to something. That’s how fickle this business is.”
“But what if you leave Hollywood and do movies back in the cities?” I asked her. I was thinking about her shooting a Flyy Girl movie back home in Philadelphia. Everyone talked about that at home. It would be an urban hit. No question about it. All Tracy had to do was find the right people to put in it.
My cousin smiled at me and said, “I can see exactly where you’re going with that. And I’ve been discussing the Flyy Girl project, believe me. But first I have to prove that we have a big enough urban audience to green-light a Flyy Girl film.”
I said, “But we would see that movie two and three times if it came out. Everybody says that. All you have to do is shoot it and advertise it.”
“I wish it were that easy,” my cousin told me. “But to do it right, it would still take more than independent money.”
“How much would it cost?” I asked her. I was sure that with the huge budgets that I read about in Hollywood movies, that they had the money out there to shoot Flyy Girl. What was so hard about getting it?
“It would cost us about twenty million dollars,” Tracy answered.
I thought about it and said, “Will Smith gets that all by himself.”
“Yeah, but not for black movies. He doesn’t even do black movies anymore. He’s, like, the science fiction king.”
She was right. I just laughed at it. Will Smith was like the only black person in the past five movies that I saw him in.
“So what kind of budgets do they give for black movies?” I asked my cousin.
“Generally between eight and sixteen million, and those are for proven all-star casts. And usually, you’re dealing with comedies, not dramas. And Flyy Girl is definitely a drama in an age group where we don’t really have stars.”
“What about if you use all rappers and singers?” I joked. They were stars.
Tracy said, “That’s exactly my point. We would be shooting in the dark. We don’t know if we can invest twenty million dollars in unproven talent. That’s what rappers and singers are when you put them in movies. It’s not automatic. They really have to make it work.”
I said, “Well.” I didn’t want the conversation to end. There just had to be a way to make Flyy Girl happen.
Tracy grinned and said, “Let’s save this argument for another day.”
But I had no idea how many days I had left.
I said, “Tracy, I know this is a big decision for both of us, but I really want to be here. I mean, I dreamed all my life of being in this position, and I don’t want to just come out here and lose it. I mean, I could help you in whatever you would need me to help you with. I’m learning how to be a good assistant. I’m learning how the Hollywood game works. And remember, I’m only sixteen now. So if you keep me around the right people, I’m real confident that in a few more years, with more experience under my belt, I’ll be a real asset to you. I mean, I promise you that.”
We were cruising through Hollywood, dressed to impress and sitting in the plush leather seats of a black stretch limo. You think I wanted to give that up so easy? No way!
Tracy just leaned back in her seat and stared at me. Then she smiled.
She said, “I had already made up my mind that I would let you stay here, Vanessa. I just needed to make sure that you really wanted to. Because this is not a passive decision. Hollywood is not about just being there, it’s about working it. Plain and simple. So if you wanna stay out here and help me, then get yourself prepared to work.”
I said, “I can do that. That’s what I want to do.”
Tracy nodded her head and said, “Aw’ight then, little cousin. If you really want it, you just remember that you asked for it.”
The Boss Lady
Let’s Make It Happen!
By the spring of 2003, I was a second-semester freshman studying media relations at UCLA. I was still hanging in there and learning the ropes of the Hollywood game, and freelancing as the personal assistant of my celebrity cousin, Tracy Ellison Grant. However, her shine in the film world was no longer as bright as it was in the book industry. I was involved in the majority of the interview and fact-checking process when Tracy wrote her sequel book, For the Love of Money, with author Omar Tyree, and the book set the market on fire as soon as it was published. For the Love of Money hit the New York Time’s bestsellers list in a week and went on to win an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. But Road Kill, my cousin’s second feature film, tanked at the box office. It pulled in a mere twelve million dollars after the production company spent close to thirty million to produce it. Tracy followed that up with an ignored film called Jump-start, about a con woman who finds a change of heart when she adopts a younger cousin, who loses her single mom to a drug overdose.
The films were not that bad, actually. The reviews were even balanced. Some critics liked them, other critics did not. No one hated the projects or lambasted Tracy’s performances in them. I just don’t think that many people cared. You had to give the people what they wanted, and at the time, I guess no one wanted to see a black woman vigilante in an action flick, or a black woman play a change-of-heart wheeler-dealer. Or maybe no one wanted to see Tracy play those roles.
Tracy and I talked about it from different angles.
> “J. Lo and Halle Berry are getting press more for their lifestyles than their film careers, if you really look at it,” I assessed to my cousin.
“And that role that Halle won the Oscar for, I mean, I hate to say it, but that was some raw stuff she did in that movie.”
Tracy grinned and agreed with me.
“You got that right. She outdid me with that one.”
We were eating strawberry ice cream with our feet up on the coffee table in the living room while we watched Entertainment Tonight on the floor-model television set. And we finally had enough furniture in the house to stop visitors from joking about echoes.
Tracy said, “J. Lo has won a couple of weekends at the box office though.”
“She just came out on the right weekends,” I commented. I wasn’t trying to hate on her, I was just stating the facts.
I said, “In the long run, Led Astray will make you just as much money or more than J. Lo’s and Halle Berry’s films. It was just well done. And it’s racking up the rentals now at Blockbuster.”
“What about Road Kill and Jump-start?” my cousin asked me with a smirk.
I smiled at her with ice cream on my tongue.
“You can’t win them all,” I answered.
We laughed about it and kept talking.
I said, “But I know one movie of yours that would blow everybody out of the box.”
Tracy looked at me, took a deep breath, and sighed.
“Here we go with that again.”
“I mean, you know it’s true,” I argued. I was talking about none other than Flyy Girl, the movie. Or even For the Love of Money for that matter. After they had read and fallen in love with the book, Tracy must have gotten at least ten emails a day, every day, from inner-city girls begging to have Flyy Girl made into a movie.
Tracy asked me, “And who could open the movie in my role?”
“Meagan Good is real hot right now after Biker Boyz,” I answered. “She could do it. Or Beyoncé’s little sister, Solange Knowles.”
I had already done my homework on it. I had a whole list of black girls who were moving up the ranks in the entertainment world, who were still teenagers or could still pass for one.
